A Million Penguins - experiment in creative writing

Penguin UK has launched 'A Million Penguins', a first-of-a-kind experiment in creative writing and collaboration based on the wiki principle at http://www.amillionpenguins.com. The wiki will be accompanied by a blog where a Penguin editor will provide a running editorial commentary on the work in progress. It is managed by Kate Pullinger, Reader in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University, along with students from the online MA in Creative Writing and New Media.

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Penguin's Digital Publisher, said: "Communities, crowdsourcing and collaboration are the buzz words of the moment and we wanted to discover whether these social values could be applied to creative writing in the same way they are to, say, open source software. To be honest, we don't know exactly what is going to happen or how this will turn out - I guess that is up to the community!"

"The success of Penguin Remixed and the recent My Penguin initiative have shown that people are not simply content to be passive consumers of content, they want to get involved and the internet has given them the means to do this," said Ettinghausen. "What we're trying to do with A Million Penguins is see how we can use the new technology platforms that now exist to bring people into the world of books and writing and hopefully provide a forum where they can express themselves creatively and have some entertainment in the process."

Penguin is collaborating with students from the MA in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University who will be contributing to the wiki and will form the seeds of the community. "The success of a wiki project depends on the committment of the community," said Ettinghausen, "and we're very pleased that these most imaginative students are on board."

see also: http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2003520,00.html
Contribute at http://www.amillionpenguins.com